be a geek!

I really didn't expect myself to voluntarily sign up for the symposium. The very 1st student symposium organized by my faculty. Who'd have thought that i'd have put in this extra effort to organize and print out a whole poster to take part in this event? Then i found out that the organizers were mostly my friends. AIYAH.. should have said earlier.. would have showed my full support lah! Anyway, i totally did not regret attending this symposium. I've been to so many biology conferences and talks and symposias, that it gets a little dry sometimes. I had also forgotten that I don't come from a purely biology faculty (but an integrated school of sciences and engineering), until i attended the first keynote lecture on friday.. WHOA... so exciting! Prof Inami from Keio university in Japan was flown in to talk about the newest technologies in robotics... how cool is that?! and he even brought some of the robots to show us.. oh manz. There's this collaboration with NUS, where they even endearingly called it the CUTE centre, to stand for Connective Ubiquitous Technology for Embodiments. hehe. really cute. looking at his presentations of James bond movie-come-to-live, i wondered why i never stuck to engineering even though i excelled better in maths and physics rather than biology. At the end of his presentation, he indicated that he was looking for post docs to work in japan. I WANT!!!! heheheheh

And that was not the end. There was another student who presented hi phD project, about lovotics. yes, love+robots. hahahha.... how fun is that? And the ultimate... i met this other guy also from the mixed reality lab (even the lab name sounds cool!)who was involved in the very recent Babbage Cabbage project (do a quick search of it and you'd see). If you think about it, back in historical times, humans made decisions by getting clues from nature. Yellowing leaves and falling leaves indicate the need to wear warmer clothing. Stampedes of elephants and scampering of mice indicate imminent floods or earthquakes. So why not go back to nature? So this vege project is a man-plant interactive system where they make use of the cabbage to warn us of dangers around and within us! So the cabbage is so smart as to detect changes in pH in the soil, or even increases in our blood pressue, and change color accordingly so we may be alerted! Wouldn't that be a truly useful vegetable to have at home? =P

so cool right? and so coincidentally, right after the symposium, today the YA walk was at hort park... and we saw plants that would dance to music! i don't know what the relation is to the cabbage project, but to me, plants that can do things other than photosynthesize, are amazing! and gav was saying, that eventually, we'll need to have certificates to approve which vegetables we can eat and which we cannot because they dance/talk/move! XD